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by sharedfrog
2291 days ago
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> that admonition is everywhere Generally speaking, I think it's because this advice is very easy to remember and repeat. Passive voice is easy to spot. Someone reading to look for errors can easily go "Aha! You did a naughty here." because they were once told that "passive = bad". |
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A whole list of evidence to the contrary:
http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/grammar/passives.html#passivepostlis...
For example:
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1504
> "On religious tolerance, he gently referenced the Christians of Lebanon and Egypt, then lamented that the 'divisions between Sunni and Shia have led to tragic violence' (note the use of the passive voice)."
The only way that statement is in the "passive voice" is if you want to ding the speaker for not blaming someone specific; that is, it's only in the passive voice in the political sense. Grammatically, it's in the active voice.
Here's a piece on what the passive voice is:
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922